A vision statement can often be confused with a mission statement to first time entrepreneurs. A vision statement is essentially, an aspirational statement that correctly describes your company’s future goals and how your company will impact the world. Lucy Hurst, Managing Director at Sherbet Donkey Media explain further.
Make it unique
A usable vision statement should be entirely unique to you and your company. It should reflect your company’s personality. It should also be a number of other things. It should be strategic. Something that will appeal to your customers and potentially your shareholders one day. Don’t focus simply on your dreams but position yourself to sell your customers the dream as well.
Be ambitious
Your vision statement will be best made usable by making it ambitious. Use your vision statement, as mentioned above, to sell your customers the dream but also to motivate staff so that everyone can buy into, and believe in, your company’s mission. The most usable vision statements are ambitious, aspirational, and passionate for working towards the company’s future. To keep your vision state usable, you should also keep it fairly broad. Not so broad that you’re essentially replicating everyone else out there but broad enough to connect your company mission statement to your company goals, however, it shouldn’t be a goal in and of itself.
If it was easy, then everyone would do it
While a usable vision statement needs to be all the above, it also, needs to be feasible. If your company’s vision statement seems to be completely unfeasible then staff and customers just won’t be able to buy into you achieving it, even if you know you’re going to. It can be really hard to pin down and write down what your vision statement is, let alone making it usable. There are a few tips to write a usable vision statement below.
Start off by writing what you’ve got
First of all, write down what you’ve got in your mind. Get it on paper/ computer. Don’t even bother with editing it at this point unless you really feel the need to, and you well might as you put get it down and then read it back. The main thing is that you get it down, you can go back and edit it later and you probably will. Make sure that you keep your vision statement based around your business aspirations and not your personal ones. The two may overlap to a certain degree however it’s important to keep it to your business to ensure that you create a usable vision statement. Start to delete anything that would be considered personal. Your employees and potential customers aren’t going to be interested in this.
Stand out from the crowd
Don’t be cliché and use a bunch of buzzwords. Your vision statement will just end up sounding like anyone else’s if you do this and you won’t be set apart. To make your vision statement truly unique and usable, speak from your knowledge of the industry, as if you are speaking to someone who knows nothing about it. To ensure that your vision statement is usable, avoid writing it in such a way that it has to be explained or could be misinterpreted. Keep in mind that your vision statement can change as your business evolves and if you so choose.
Get feedback
Finally, to make sure that you’ve created a usable vision statement, talk to others about what does and doesn’t work with what you’ve put together. Get their feedback, it might just be a case of rewording what you’ve got slightly to make it sound more attractive, it might be a case of bouncing ideas of other people, or it might be a case that you go back to the drawing board.
Whatever your vision statement is, it should remain unique to the aspirations that you have for your business in order to keep it truly usable. The rest is just in the finer details which, if you’ve created a vision statement, is completely within your reach. A usable vision statement like this will help with employee attainment, retainment as well as getting customers to buy into the idea of your company.
